Peta, the animal rights association, regularly denounces the choices made by certain video game studios. She thus pointed the finger at the game God of War: Ragnarök available on PS4 and PS5 since November 9, 2022, reports the Huffington Post .
In a tweet published on Wednesday November 16, 2022, the fight with one of the game’s bosses was highlighted. The player, who embodies the demigod Kratos, must indeed fight against Garm, an 18 m high wolf from Norse mythology.
Ban animal violence
However, it is not the fight that worries Peta, but the story of this wolf, who is said to have been abandoned and chained by the god Tyr in the snowy mountains of Hellhaim, one of the worlds of the game. .
“If you’re cold, they’re cold. Tyr was wrong to chain that pup up and leave him outside in the freezing cold of Hellheim” said Peta. The association asked Cory Barlog, one of the game’s developers, to create a mode that would remove animal violence from God of War: Ragnarök.
“You know that’s not a real wolf?” »
If this initiative aimed to raise awareness among Internet users on the issue of animal abandonment and animal violence, Peta’s statements have destabilized the developer. “You know it’s not a real wolf, right?” We do not encourage anyone to fight or harm animals in the real world” replied on Twitter Cory Barlog.
This is not the first time that Peta has used a video game in a communication campaign, recalls the HuffPost. From 2012, with the release of Pokemon Black and White 2the association had made a bloody parody of the game. More recently, in 2020, Peta had also criticized the latest Animal Crossing on Switch due to a character that “encourages villagers to remove fish from their natural habitat so he can imprison them in tiny aquariums” .